Christ's Beatific Vision: The Scriptural and Patristic Evidence

Having already treated Christ’s divine knowledge as Logos (i.e., as God) in an earlier volume,¹ we confine ourselves here to His human knowledge — one of the most difficult problems in all of Christology. While the Church, in her controversies with various heretics, was repeatedly forced to define matters concerning our Lord’s will, she never had comparable occasion to settle the questions surrounding His intellect.

The Hypostatic Union is the source of every prerogative and grace with which Christ’s soul is endowed — the highest and noblest a creature can receive. Yet since no creature can become God (this would be a contradiction), Christ’s humanity is not itself God; the Hypostatic Union did not apotheosize the assumed manhood, but produced something more precisely defined. The mystery surrounding the Hypostatic Union makes it genuinely difficult to find the correct mean between overstating and understating what Christ’s human knowledge involved — which is probably why certain theologians have departed from the traditional teaching on this point. But the universal, constant teaching of Catholic theologians on matters of faith remains our best source of certainty.

Generally speaking, human knowledge is of three kinds: that derived from the beatific vision of God, infused knowledge, and acquired or experimental knowledge drawn from sense perception and experience. The first (scientia beata) is the prerogative of the elect in Heaven, who share in the Trinity’s own knowledge through the light of glory.

Thesis I: From the First Moment of Its Existence in a Human Body, the Soul of Our Lord Jesus Christ Enjoyed the Beatific Vision of God

If Christ’s soul on earth already possessed the beatific vision, together with the knowledge of God and creation that vision implies, then His state was not simply that of a wayfarer, but rather already the status termini proper to the elect in Heaven — hence the theological axiom, “Christ was wayfarer and possessor at once” (Christus erat viator simul et comprehensor). Modernist theologians object that this axiom is either self-contradictory, or at least incompatible with Christ’s life and Passion in His role as Mediator, and so deny Him the beatific vision on earth. Since Scripture and Tradition contain no formal definition on this exact point, this denial does not amount to heresy — but it runs against a theological conclusion so firmly supported by the unanimous consent of older theologians and the belief of the faithful that it may be regarded as certain. Suarez goes further: “I regard the contrary opinion as erroneous, even bordering on heresy, because the testimony of Scripture together with the teaching of the Fathers and the consensus of all Catholic doctors suffices to produce certainty.”² This may seem overly severe, but it is hard to escape the force of Petavius’s own more measured statement: “No Christian writer in good faith — that is, no Catholic writer — has ever held any other view of Christ than that He never, from the moment He began to live, lacked the divine vision; nor is there anyone today, however unlettered or untrained, who, asked what Christ is, would not say the same, however roughly he might know it.”³ A further reason to hold the traditional view: the Scholastics and later theologians, though fully aware of the difficulties that lead modern writers to reject it, never departed from the Fathers’ path.

The Scriptural Argument

A solid Scriptural argument requires texts speaking expressly of Christ’s human knowledge — texts that merely prove His divine knowledge,⁴ or that can be explained away by the Communication of Idioms,⁵ prove nothing here.

Some theologians appeal to John 3:13: “No man hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven” — reading “is in heaven” as “possesses the beatific vision.” This is not compelling: by the Communication of Idioms, “Son of man” is “in heaven” in exactly the same sense as “Son of God,” since both simply name the one Divine Person of the Logos.⁶

A more telling text is John 1:17-18: “For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Though this refers primarily to the Son’s divine vision in the Father’s bosom, the Evangelist seems to include the human vision of Christ’s soul as well. Had he meant only the Logos’s divine vision as such, “He who declares” would be either a mere mouthpiece or, at best, a prophet enlightened by revelation — in the first case Christ would rank beneath Moses, in the second no higher than him, since no prophet can declare the mysteries of God without divine inspiration. But John’s whole point is that Christ’s superiority to Moses is not one of degree but of kind — as different as the Old Covenant from the New. Wherein does that difference lie? In this: “He who declares” — the Son of man as such — truly saw God. Christ’s soul, then, possessed the beatific vision.

St. Thomas appeals successfully to John 8:55: “You have not known him [the Father], but I know him. And if I shall say that I know him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know him, and do keep his word.”⁷ “I know him” here describes a clear, intuitive knowledge of the Father — and so of the whole Trinity — a knowledge possible only through the beatific vision. Our Savior claims this knowledge not only as God but as man, since it is precisely as man that He can “keep the word” of His Father and say, in the verse just before, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father that glorifieth me” (John 8:54).

The Patristic Argument

The Patristic texts we can adduce are too sparse to constitute a strict argument from the Fathers.

St. Augustine, in his allegorical reading of the raising of Lazarus, observes that Lazarus lying shrouded in the tomb figures our earthly knowledge of God, while Lazarus restored to life symbolizes the knowledge of God we will enjoy in Heaven⁸ — a comparison, he adds, that holds for all men except Christ, who already enjoyed the beatific vision as a wayfarer on earth.⁹ Pope St. Leo the Great teaches: “Since the simple and unchangeable nature of the Godhead is always wholly present in its own essence, receiving neither loss nor increase to itself, it thus beatifies the assumed nature in such a way that the glorified [nature] remains within the glorifying [nature].”¹⁰

The only ecclesiastical writer to treat this question directly is St. Fulgentius of Ruspe, who holds that Christ’s soul, given its divine dignity from the Hypostatic Union, must necessarily have possessed the beatific vision: “Let us take care lest, while we do not believe Christ’s soul knows the Father totally, we deny to Christ Himself any knowledge whatsoever, not only of the Father but even of Himself and of the Holy Spirit — for it would be a harsh thing indeed, and foreign to sound faith, to say that Christ’s soul does not have full knowledge of His own Godhead, with which it is naturally believed to constitute one Person.”¹¹ Had Fulgentius simply explained, as St. Thomas would centuries later, that Christ’s soul on earth saw but did not adequately comprehend the Trinity — since no creature can adequately comprehend the Godhead — he would deserve the title “a Scholastic before Scholasticism” in this field. But he overreaches by identifying simple vision with adequate comprehension, a move that has troubled more than one later theologian.¹² Fulgentius himself seems to have sensed he had gone too far, adding elsewhere: “We can indeed say that Christ’s soul possesses full knowledge of its own Godhead; yet I do not know whether we should say that Christ’s soul knows His Godhead in the same way the Godhead knows itself, or rather that it knows as much as the Godhead does, though not in the same manner as the Godhead does… For that soul received its knowledge from the very Godhead which it knows fully.”¹³ This distinction does not, needless to say, adequately safeguard the dogma of God’s absolute incomprehensibility.¹⁴

Beyond this, we may still claim Patristic support for our thesis insofar as the Fathers teach two things: that Christ made no intrinsic advance in either His divine or human knowledge, any more than in holiness or grace;¹⁵ and that His human intellect admitted no ignorance in the strict sense, against the Agnoetae. The first of these presupposes, and the second favors, the doctrine that Christ’s human soul possessed the beatific vision. Since the Fathers ground both claims in the Hypostatic Union, they must have held that Christ possessed the beatific vision from the very instant of His conception — the creation of His soul.

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